After years spent as a struggling translator and poet, Paul Auster published his first works of fiction in the mid 1980s - City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room, three brilliant variations on the classic detective story which, published together as The New York Trilogy, became the international hit that established his reputation.

Introducing themes that have run throughout his work ever since, Auster managed to combine formal experimentation with classic storytelling, and to inform his exploration of America and the self with a distinctly European sensibility. Included here in the first volume of his collected novels, alongside his seminal debut are In the Country of Last Things, a dark, dystopian vision of the future, and Moon Palace, a sweeping multi-generation novel that begins 'in the summer that man first walked on the moon'.

All told in his characteristic clean prose style, these three novels form the first chapter in an ongoing career that has marked Auster out as one of the most original, relevant and enduring novelists at work today.